Highly detailed map of the Chesapeake Bay region, showing towns, rivers, inlets, shoals, Islands, and other details.
Predates the resolution of the boundary dispute between the Penn Family and Lord Baltimore over the ownership of Delaware. Cape Hinlopen was ultimately the deciding point of reference, which resulted in the Penn Family obtaining control of most of Delaware, a dispute which began in the 17th Century and was not resolved until the 1750s and ultimately mapped by Mason & Dixon in the early 1760s.
This map depicts the entire Chesapeake Bay and extends from the lower part of Pennsylvania south, to the Norfolk area. Delaware is not named. Symbols are provided for English plantations and for Indian plantations and houses.
This map is important because it is probably the most widely owned map of the tidewater region in the 18th century in its various editions and states. Based on Augustine Herrman's four-sheet map of 1670, it is much smaller and covers less area. There are no soundings given, although shoals are shown by stippling.
Remarkable detail throughout. One of the best and most detailed maps of its size issued in the 1st half of the 18th Century.
Herman Moll (c. 1654-1732) was one of the most important London mapmakers in the first half of the eighteenth century. Moll was probably born in Bremen, Germany, around 1654. He moved to London to escape the Scanian Wars. His earliest work was as an engraver for Moses Pitt on the production of the English Atlas, a failed work which landed Pitt in debtor's prison. Moll also engraved for Sir Jonas Moore, Grenville Collins, John Adair, and the Seller & Price firm. He published his first original maps in the early 1680s and had set up his own shop by the 1690s.
Moll's work quickly helped him become a member of a group which congregated at Jonathan's Coffee House at Number 20 Exchange Alley, Cornhill, where speculators met to trade stock. Moll's circle included the scientist Robert Hooke, the archaeologist William Stuckley, the authors Jonathan Swift and Daniel Defoe, and the intellectually-gifted pirates William Dampier, Woodes Rogers and William Hacke. From these contacts, Moll gained a great deal of privileged information that was included in his maps.
Over the course of his career, he published dozens of geographies, atlases, and histories, not to mention numerous sheet maps. His most famous works are Atlas Geographus, a monthly magazine that ran from 1708 to 1717, and The World Described (1715-54). He also frequently made maps for books, including those of Dampier’s publications and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Moll died in 1732. It is likely that his plates passed to another contemporary, Thomas Bowles, after this death.